Showing posts from 2008|10

31|10|2008

Funky may be the new disco, but that's not
stopping anybody from jumping on the bandwagon. Seems like all it
takes is for Kode9 to publicly announce his
approval and every blogger is a convert.

Skream, on the other hand, was recently overheard giving the thumbs
down to Rinse's new Funky club night, Beyond. But before we could
jump to conclusions about the crown prince of Dubstep disapproving
the new old dance permutation, he quickly corrected us. Seems his
disdain is just for Beyond and not for Funky. In fact, he tells us
that he's got a new project in the works called Funky Junkie, a
collaboration with noted Funky-man Geeneus. But Skream, darling,
haven't you heard Geeneus's remix of "Night"? It's crap.

Now, before you all start wondering about a possible rift in the
Ammunition camp, let's talk about real catfights.
Apparently, the minimal techno scene in Berlin isn't quite as cosy
as we thought it was. A little bird tells us that Perlon and M-nus
may have been having a little tiff for
yoinks. It may or may not have had something to do
with M-Nus 'licensing' tracks from Perlon without permission.
Naughty naughty. Still, Perlon may be having the last laugh as it
turns out we weren't the only ones who enjoyed M-Nus's
hairball-inducing photoshoot for Contakt. Richie may make some
good music, but that doesn't mean he has any taste.

Finally, in a real WTF moment, we've been informed (belatedly, why
are we the last to find out about everything?) that Russell
Haswell's partner is Amanda Donohoe. She of
television fame circa LA Law, etc. Apparently, she also used to go
out with Adam Ant, so maybe she just likes moody musicians?

27|10|2008

Amongst other goodies in The
Wire 297 was a piece on Anthony Braxton's Arista recordings,
where some of his wildest projects were bankrolled by a major label
hungry for the new thing of the New Thing (it was probably the most
complex feature I've ever subbed on the magazine, where Bill
Shoemaker patiently unfolds these densely layered constructions).

Mosaic have kindly given us one of these great box sets of the
Arista years, and there's a competition on our site to win it:

We'd like you to draw a diagram in the style used by Anthony
Braxton to name his compositions graphically. The diagram should be
describing a piece of music for any combination of instruments or
elements. The main aim is to produce a diagram that looks like it
might have been rendered by Anthony Braxton to name one of his
compositions. The more imaginative and wild the better. Remember
this is the musician who scored pieces for orchestras and puppet
theatres, as well as for multiple orchestras located on different
planets and in different galaxies.

If Anthony Braxton spent the 70s scoring pieces for celestial
orchestras, I think you owe it to him to have a scribble with a pen
and paper. More info is here

22|10|2008

Re Derek's
post yesterday:
As an uplifting balm to soothe the terror of their doom laden
Clearspot last night, Resonance FM is
broadcasting the work of artist and shaman Marcus Coates. "Pastoral
Spirit" will apparently include a choir singing birdsong along with
performing a variety of animal calls. Will the concrete hardened
city worker find the same solace in Coates' channeling of relaxing
ambient nature as the residents of
Linosa Close did?

21|10|2008

What better time than during the biggest ever economic collapse
to explore the strangely comforting tones of Doom Metal? With
leading band names like Earth, Om and Sunn, this drone laden branch
of heavy metal cultivates an elemental niche where aficionados
enjoy artistic creativity predicated on electric guitars and a
world rendered absurd.

20|10|2008

It's hard to resist an album called 1970's Algerian
Proto-Rai Underground. You've got the promise of some strange
prototype of unheard urban music; the North African connection,
only a decade and a bit after Algeria emerged from French rule;
plus, the idea of pop operating through underground channels, which
sounds a contradiction in terms for Westerners, but is less
improbable in the Middle East and North Africa (I'm reminded of the
electronica underground in Iran, for instance).

The music is almost as exciting as the title. One refrain on the
album is particularly familiar to fans of 90s rave, with one track
using a version of the "We are IE" vocal, which found
its way, twisted via rave speak, onto Lenny De Ice's proto-jungle
classic "We Are E". I'm not sure what the vocal is – it's
found across a lot of Rai music, with what sounds like the same
lyrics and the same melody. Whatever, the refrain is certainly
spine-chilling, and so memorable that the dancehall/urban/mixadelic
website weareie, who curate the
excellent Blogariddims series, grabbed it for their name (which
puns on the Irish connection of the people who do the site).

The audio meme of this vocal secretly linking rai and rave sent me
on a frenzy of googling and downloading, trying to figure out other
versions of the refrain. I eventually remembered Cheb Mami had done
a particularly good track which had it in; a pop song which is like
an excerpt from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, with
the kind of eerie vocal that graced "Boat Woman Song" from Holger
Czukay's Canaxis.

Maybe it's the one Lenny De Ice sampled, but in any case, the track
is mindboggling in its own right. The time signatures are so fluid
I can't follow them at all, and yet it's entirely second nature to
Cheb Mami himself. Some amazing fusions happened when francophone
African musicians had to figure out what they were doing on the fly
in Parisian recording studios; Cheb Mami's stuff is some of the
best I've heard. It's instantly resonant, but complex and elusive
too... much like that vocal refrain itself.

It's well worth checking out - and stands its own next to almost
any other tune from anywhere on the planet. Cheb
Mami- "Douni El Bladi" [RE-UPPED 24/10/08)

13|10|2008

I got a nostalgic rush when a promo CD of the
new Streets album came into the office – not a reaction to the CD
inside, but the slipcase, which is from (presumably purchased, but
who knows?) Music And Video Exchange, the dusty and sprawling
Notting Hill second hand record emporium where I used to work for
quite a few years. The red sticker in the corner, where they reduce
the prices month by month, is the giveaway. As it happens, I'm not
the only Wire writer who has passed through its, er, hallowed
doors.

I was in the the other day, selling old CDs into the shops to
exchange for other stuff. My plan to invest in valuable classical
vinyl, in the hope that it will hold its value when the economy
goes into total meltdown, was thwarted, though. Their classical
shop due is to close any day, and the racks were empty. I wonder,
though, with an upcoming recession, if second hand emporiums will
soon be booming again, packed with fresh stock from cash-strapped
punters.

The beauty of MVE was that you came at music culture
backwards. You're surrounded not by usual music that is pushed
at you, but the stuff that gathers together at the margins.
Outdated music was often more poignant than music which still held
its popular currency. In most MVE shops, records never went below
50p – even at that price, the assumption was that someone would
have a use for it, even if the root of that use was as kitsch,
sample fodder or curiosity value. This was where you found new uses
for music. The process is rather like musical compost, biodegrading
in its own filth, but providing all sorts of vital micro nutrients
to other growths. I used to greedily suck up cheap old jungle
compilations, packed with fat hits but with zero cool quotient;
hit-it-and-quit-it dancehall 7"s which had been cheapily pressed up
in the thousands and were now sitting around gathering dust; random
white labels, noone knowing what the hell they are except for a
catalogue number; quasi bootleg jazz compilations which nonetheless
provided strange trawls through the oeuvres of the likes of Billie
Holliday and Charlie Parker.

Recycling all these vast swathes of music culture, you get that
sense of the street finding its own use for things, as the saying
goes; what The Streets has to do with it, I'm not so sure.

09|10|2008

Didn't manage to get this posted in time for anyone near London to
be able to get to the show unfortunately (my apologies) but
André Avelãs's exhibition in
the IBID Projects space
in East London was a good example of the sculpture as musical
instrument approach to sound art.

The small gallery space was filled with a low level whine that
sounded as if the air conditioning had gone dangerously awry, the
atmosphere having something toxic about it, making the room foggy
in the same way a fire alarm can cause a blinkered panic or loss of
peripheral vision. The cause of the whine was a number of large
balloons deflating slowly throughout the day, their leaking nozzles
hooked up to small whistles and a Hohner Melodica. The result being
a constant feeling of, well, anxious deflation - the composition a
prolonged entropic sighing glissando, though the sight of the giant
balloons with "HIGHLY FLAMMABLE" hand stencilled onto their surface
offset the droning with a cartoon quality.

With work like this I always wish to see them in some form of a
performance. Why create these interestingly odd
sculpture/instrument hybrids, then let them idle away their time in
the relatively sober environs of a contemporary art gallery?
Though, a show he was
in as part of last Summer's Tuned City festival in Berlin looked
interesting, much more active and dirty.

On the cover: Holly Herndon – the US sound artist and laptop auteur spreads the faith of the liberating potential of technology. A Primer on the maverick composer Moondog, Daniel Spicer on Brighton's outsider poets and musicians, Lightning Bolt take The Wire's Invisible Jukebox test, Isnaj Dui, Radiophrenia, Jlin and much more. Plus: our latest 20 track CD, free to all readers with The Wire.